Precision Searches

Custom-tailored search tools are helping e-commerce sites improve their customer service, trim costs and hopefully boost revenue

By NOAH SHACHTMAN

Search services have long been a consumer Web favorite. But the latest generation of search tools have become so precise that they're becoming powerful tools for enterprises as well. E-commerce managers at Office Depot, Iomega, barnesandnoble.com, and Bell Canada are using search tools like Ask Jeeves, Northern Light, Google and Copernic 2000 to help boost customer service, increase site traffic, learn more about their users and improve site design.

Straightforward site searches are nothing new. There's hardly a content or commerce destination without one. Many of the search tools are licensed from big consumer search engines like Excite and AltaVista. But while these tools regularly rank as a highly visited location at many sites, they're often among the least useful.

"When you look at the search functions at most e-commerce sites, they're doing a horrible job," says Forrester Research analyst Paul Hagen. If a query doesn't exactly match a site's content, the search probably won't work. And if the user is unfamiliar with the Boolean logic and precise language required to make a typical search tool work--as so many new to the Internet are--most people give up. As Hagen says: "Do a search on Godiva.com for white chocolate, and you'll get no results. But look for ivory chocolate, and it'll show 40 items."

To make results more relevant, Web site managers are employing newer search services that can add a degree of intelligence to responses, broaden the scope of explorations and let questions be asked online just as they would in the real world--in everyday language, not in the stilted terminology of computer jargon.

On the Web site of data storage giant Iomega Corp., users can type in technical support questions in plain English. Some examples: Why does the computer freeze when I install Zip tools, and Where can I download Iomega drivers? This tool, located on the support section of iomega.com, is a customized version of the consumer question answering service from Ask Jeeves Inc. Called simply "Find It," the service searches only support-related knowledge bases on Iomega's site.

The service's ease of use has made it very popular, very quickly. More than 20 percent of the visitors to Iomega's support site are now using Find It, which has been in place since August. And overall, 70 percent of Iomega's customer support contacts are taking place online. Only 30 percent are now handled over the phone.

"We want to give our customers service in whatever form they want--whether it's phone or Web," says Mike Nikzad, Iomega's director of Web and systems support. "But obviously, from a business point of view, we'd like to maximize our contacts through the Web."

With customer service calls often costing as much as $50 each, so would a lot of businesses. Even a slight decrease in call volume could mean millions in savings. "Finding a tech support answer without getting someone on the phone--that's really valuable," says Kathleen Hall, an associate analyst for the Giga Information Group.

More than 20 companies in the online retail, financial service, health-care, and technical sectors have signed up with Ask Jeeves for customized search service.

Microsoft, Compaq Computer and Dell Computer are all using Ask Jeeves to handle customer support questions.

Many more companies are expected to be added with Jeeves' recent acquisition of Net Effect Systems Inc., a real-time Web-based help system.

Companies like SouthWestern Bell use the Net Effect service to allow users to chat directly with customer service representatives.

After the merger between Net Effect and Ask Jeeves is complete, customers should be able to ask questions using the Ask Jeeves search engine, then follow up with a live customer service representative online using the Net Effect technology.

Office Depot's site features "Ask Office Depot," a Jeeves-based tool that locates products on OfficeDepot.com and educates consumers about the e-commerce process.

When users ask questions--like "How can I find help setting up an account?" or "Where can I find bookcases?"--they receive links to the appropriate pages on the Office Depot site.

"We've got a large content base. And we're targeting the small-businessperson and the office manager," says Keith Butler, vice president of Officedepot.com. "These are people that aren't necessarily technically sophisticated. So we needed a search vehicle that was both intuitive and could look across a wide array of data."

Ask Office Depot has been both simple to use and able to cover the large product database, Butler reports. But there have been other benefits as well. The service--which runs on a single server and requires just the part-time attention of only a single employee--records every question asked and every response given. And so the search tool doubles as an online focus group.

The results can point out problem areas previously unknown to site managers. "People kept asking about delivery. We thought we had done a good job peppering the site with information about delivery options," says Butler. "But obviously, we hadn't." Now, the site has extensive delivery information in the help area and features delivery tips throughout.

Forrester's Hagen believes that this feedback may be as valuable a contribution as any the search services make. Traditionally, Web chiefs have looked at the paths users took through the site (known as clickstreams) to gauge site design and performance.

"The problem with clickstreams is you don't know why people clicked the way they did. With search, people are giving you their reasons with the questions they ask," Hagen says. "There's a tremendous amount of learning you can take from search logs. It can give you really good insight."

That reporting insight was a major factor in Iomega's decision to implement Ask Jeeves. "We wanted a closed-loop type system, where it would be easy to get decent reporting," says Iomega's Mike Nikzad. "Now, I get a weekly report that tells me what people are asking, what people are asking that we didn't have answers for, and what percentage of customers pick the document that Jeeves suggests."

But implementing Ask Jeeves isn't cheap. A typical corporate installation runs around $350,000 and can run as high as $1 million. Rental and maintenance of the service averages an annual $100,000 to $200,000 after the first year.

Implementing Ask Jeeves isn't easy either. Some other search services rely solely on an automated process that "crawls" and indexes the site on its own. Ask Jeeves, on the other hand, is primarily a human process.

Ask Jeeves' management assembles a team of editors for every corporate project. After an initial automated indexing of the site, this team builds a core vocabulary of the site's key concepts. At a basketball site, for example, these words could include general concepts like "points" and "rebounding," as well as specifics like "Knicks" and "Latrell Sprewell."

Next, the editors write a document that defines what questions will be answered--"How many points does Latrell Sprewell average?" or "Are the Knicks better than the Bulls in rebounding?" After that, the Ask Jeeves editors map the site's content to the questions--perhaps using the URL basketball.net/players/sprewell for Sprewell's statistics; or basketball.net/teams/compare as the link for analyzing the Knicks relative strength in rebounding.

None of the companies currently using the service were willing to give details on how their sites are indexed, citing competitive advantage.

Finally, the Ask Jeeves team implements a language analysis tool. Looking at both word choice and grammar, this tool tries to match users' questions to the queries already written by the Ask Jeeves editors.

It makes for an interface that's still a bit clunky, Forrester's Hagen says. That's because the service responds to a user's question with another question, which then is supposed to point the user to the appropriate Web page.

However, in many cases, the two questions don't correspond. On the Office Depot site, for example, the inquiry "Where can I find toner for my HP printer?" returns questions like "Where can I read the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet Printing Supplies Compatibility Guide?" and "What happens when I run out of toner?" This is the closest match, but it's not as precise as it should be, analysts say.

"I've seen some anecdotal evidence that there's only a 30 percent to 40 percent hit rate," Forrester's Hagen says. "That means 60 percent to 70 percent of questions aren't answered."

Giga's Kathleen Hall adds, "Ask Jeeves really works best for more general questions."

Ask Jeeves is working on the problem. "We only cover a subset of a site's content," admits Sean Murphy, vice president of marketing for Ask Jeeves. Questions outside this range go unanswered.

To compensate, it's trying to incorporate a pure search, like the consumer version of the service, which scours the Web using a metasearch of several search services, including Infoseek, Excite, Altavista, Hotbot and others.

Ask Jeeves isn't alone in its pursuit of corporate customers. Other next-generation search tools are looking to establish themselves on corporate sites, as well.

Heavily financed, two-month old start-up Google Inc. has already signed up Red Hat and The Washington Post as customers. Google is distinguishing itself by not only analyzing the words on a Web page, but also by looking at what other sites are linking to that page. For example, RedHat.com is using Google to search its own site as well as selected sites devoted to the Linux operating system.

Google factors these sites into its search rating system. The more high-traffic sites that link to a particular page, the more important that page becomes, and therefore, the higher up in a list of search results it appears.

Google is offering site-specific and Web-wide search tools to corporate clientele for $150,000 to $400,000 per year.

Even Copernic Technologies Inc., the Quebec firm best known for its $39 to $79 downloadable metasearch utilities, has gotten into the enterprise act. A server-side version of its tool, CopernicServer, is now deployed by sites like Bell Canada division Sympatico.ca, the largest ISP and portal in Canada.

Since Oct. 15, visitors to Sympatico's French language site can search for cars, jobs and houses in the classified sections of major French Canadian sites; 5,000 searches are now being conducted daily. And Sympatico's advertising sales force is busy recruiting sponsors for targeted interstitial banner ads--at rates considerably higher than the rest of the portal.

"We see this as a very significant revenue opportunity," says Nicolas Gaudreau, Sympatico's general manager. "As a portal, we're always looking for ways we can play the role of a mediator or agent and add value for our users."

The same attitude is very much in evidence at barnesandnoble.com, the online spin-off of the bookselling giant. Barnesandnoble.com is now featuring a search service from Northern Light Technology LLC as part of an ongoing push to make the site more than just a book e-retailer. The Northern Light tool allows users, after they've conducted an initial author or title search, to comb the Web for related newspaper and magazine articles.

"We're just trying to make it a more robust site, a more useful site, a better place for people to get information," says Tom Simon, barnesandnoble.com's vice president of content development. Richer content, Simon hopes, will lead to longer site stays, which means more advertising and, hopefully, commerce revenue.

The barnesandnoble.com search highlights several ways in which Northern Light departs from the traditional group of search engines. In addition to the usual laundry list of results that most search engines provide, Northern Light also gives users custom search folders, which are automatically created by the service whenever a search is conducted. These subjects and sources allow inquiries to be narrowed quickly--to instantly differentiate between, say, searches for Neptune the planet and for Neptune the sea god.

According to Northern Light Chief Technology Officer Marc Krellenstein, when a search is conducted, Northern Light uses an automatic classification process, based on neural network technology, to match each page to one or more of 25,000 subjects.

Much of the material Northern Light returns during its searches are part of the service's 8,000,000 document-strong special proprietary collection of articles from over 5,400 newspaper, magazine, journal and government sites.

Users pay approximately $2 to $4 each for documents from sources like The Economist, Christian Science Monitor, Fortune and the Baltimore Sun. This revenue is often shared with Northern Light's client sites, which pay the search firm annual fees starting at $115,000 for the service.

Such public Web searches are only one step in ongoing attempts by business to integrate new search tools. The next move, many predict, is on to corporate intranet and extranet sites. If greater, smarter information access and support works for customers, the thinking goes, why not for employees and partners?

Both Copernic and Northern Light have enrolled intranet-based clients, though they are unwilling to name them at this time. And Ask Jeeves' business customers are already musing about internal deployments of the service. While none of these companies would offer specifics, hypothetically an Internet search might look for sales figures for a particular region or marketing materials to handle a particular kind of customer.

"If this is working so well on the Internet, how about the intranet? Why couldn't employees ask about insurance policies, or benefits, or job openings?" asks Office Depot's Butler. "There are so many possibilities."

Noah Shachtman is a technology journalist based in New York. He can be reached at noahmax@inch.com.